Specifying the Use of CIM in an EMS Project Jay Britton, Fellow, IEEE 2009 PSCE, Seattle jay.britton@areva-td.com

Topics The CIM Value Proposition -- General How to get what will be valuable to your EMS project.

From Applications Era to Systems Era 1975-1990

From Systems Era to Enterprise Era 2005-2020

A Current SOA Vision from D2.24

The Canonical Data Model Concept

The CIM Value Proposition Enterprise architectural goals … Completeness. Organize IT at the enterprise level. Consistency. Universal data semantics. (CIM canonical data model) System management, re-use and integration. (SOA / enterprise integration bus) Openness. Increase the customer’s freedom to use different vendors. Standard interfaces at key interface points. … lead to lower IT complexity, lower IT cost. Concentration of investment in high quality core products. Fewer overall skillsets required. Less orphaned code. More rapid response to business needs. Healthy competition. Incremental implementation – as in an EMS Project. Evaluate general vendor commitment to the vision. Evaluate existing product conformance. Evaluate participation in CIM community. Evaluate development program direction. Require the specific interfaces that deliver value to the project.

CIGRE D2.24 Information Architecture Producer – Consumer View of Interfaces

CIGRE D2.24 Information Architecture Historical Data

Where do you fit? What are your EMS goals? Leader / Early Adopter General strategic value seen in leadership. Push IEC / CIGRE D2.24 development. Regional grid operators; very large utilities. Progressive EMS Owner 3rd generation EMS owner with active evergreen EMS program. Follow IEC / CIGRE D2.24 recommendations. Keep my EMS technology and functionality current. Interconnection Participant Information exchange with peers and/or regional authorities. Enterprise Functional Integration My EMS is an enterprise component. Model, real-time and historical data exported; plans imported. Strong IT Program Canonical data model (“ubermodel”) methodology. Enterprise SOA architecture goals. Enterprise integration bus. Technology selected to minimize skillsets and cost. New to CIM and Ready to Learn Just want a functional EMS

General Recommendations for Traditional Specifications For leaders: Invest time and resources in the governing committees. Ability to draft appropriate specifications follows from position as insider. For others: Find good professional advice… Regularly contributing members of governing committees are always the best source. Assess how close any expert is to the inner circle. Give a weight to the importance of vendor commitment to CIM for your organization. Generic “conform to CIM” specifications are not very productive. Ask the vendors to describe their CIM strategy in depth and in language that creates a commitment to deliver. Don’t force vendors to address requirements if they aren’t really requirements. Include specific requirements that address your specific interface needs. e.g. Require 61970-452 Model Exchange support if you intend to use it for exchange with other utilities.

Ideas for those looking for a better way to buy a system. Abandon the traditional fixed-price competitive bid model. What you really want is to select an EMS partner for the future. This should be a mutual ‘getting to know you’ and ‘getting to trust you’ process. The most knowledgeable folks in CIM (and other key architectural issues) are the ones that implement it – which is predominantly the various vendors. Traditional purchasing rules tend to limit what the vendor can know about you and what you can know about the vendor. The way to know each other is to work together. Instead of keeping the vendors at arms length in the preparation of a specification, use them in the preparation process. Share your requirements. Talk to the vendors like you would talk to your consultant. Work with each vendor to shape their best answer to your requirements – don’t try to make them all conform to the same architectural specification. This increases your comparative knowledge of the vendors. This gives you direct experience in whether they are easy to do business with. Weed out vendors as you proceed to refine designs. Pay T&M when vendor work becomes significant (limits and rates set by you). Ask finalists for fixed price commitments to the clearly scoped parts of the contract. Some integration work is never clear enough to work well as fixed price. Select final vendor(s) to work with.

Problematic CIM Requirements Some paraphrased EMS CIM language that we see in specifications… compliance with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) Common Information Model (CIM) compliance with the Control Centre Application Programming Interface (CCAPI) initiatives CIM/XML model exchange compliance CIM interfaces to EMS data compliant to GID (Generic Interface Definition) Generic Data Access (GDA) Generic Eventing and Subscription (GES) High Speed Data Access (HSDA) Time Series Data Access (TSDA) CIM compliance defined as meaning that interface definitions comply with the CIM UML model in terms of: Grouping of data into classes Naming and meaning of data Type of data Relationships between CIM classes Problems: Inexact references to documents. Overlapping functionality in the methods. Generic methods are prescribed without stating what data is to be available via what methods.

Stating Specific CIM Requirements Always start by defining the scope (business function) of the interface. If there is an IEC standard, start with the document that describes the business function. IEC CIM document structure isn’t always helpful in figuring this out. If there is a CIM standard in progress, use a draft of that work. e.g. State estimator output is a work currently in progress. Or, write your own scope for an interface that you need. You will be asking here for the vendor to develop an interface based on a CIM extension. Example – for the network model exchange standard: The right starting place is the 61970-452 document that explains the business problem and identifies the data items required in network model exchange. 452 depends on the 61970-301 document, which gives the CIM UML information model defining the structure of the required data. 452 also depends on the 61970-552 document, which defines how to format a model exchange file using RDF XML encoding. (552 in turn depends on some information in the 501.) Just as importantly, this standard does not depend on the 61970-4xx series of documents that define the GID, so GID access is not part of the model exchange standard. 61970-452 61970-301 61970-552 61970-501

Summary: CIM Specifications in an EMS Ask the vendors to describe their CIM strategy in depth and in language that creates a commitment to deliver. Write individual specifications for CIM business interfaces that have a specific value proposition. If there is a specific IEC standard for the interface, reference it. If there is no specific CIM standard, then… Describe the business purpose. Describe the required content of the ‘datasets’ (CIGRE D2.24 term). Require the vendor to design the datasets by extending the CIM and deriving a schema from the CIM. State implementation requirements for each interface. Preferred – require vendor to specify what implementation technology or standard will be used. Alternatively – require specific mechanisms as appropriate to your enterprise architecture goals: (61970-552 (RDF XML), 61970-4xx GID data access, XML schema, integration bus vs claim-checked files vs other, etc.)